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Alfred Kern About Literary Wars Alfred Kern About Literary Wars e sat at one of those high round tables at a neighborhood beer joint. At the bar, somebody commented on the wisdom of the war in Iraq. We glanced at each other and continued to swallow beer. Then, fromW somewhere in our own circle, I heard the question. “So tell me, what’s your favorite literary war?” “Can we go back to the Greeks? “Sure, the Greeks wrote some good wars. If you need to show off, you can use the Peloponnesian War.” “Oh, first we have to decide. Both nonfiction and fiction? Cause if it includes nonfiction, the Civil War has a bushel basket bibliography. Without the Civil War, half the guys teaching American history would never have earned a pee- aitch-dee.” Next day, home and alone, I considered the question more seriously, and I restricted it to modern literature. My father, an immigrant in the early years of the twentieth century, had earned his American citizenship fighting in World War I. On a clean shelf in the basement, my mother had stored his army helmet, one of those round iron hats that I sometimes wore at a rakish tilt for rainy day make believe. But not long after such games, I had begun to read: A Farewell to Arms, of course, plus the war stories collected in Hemingway’s The First Forty- Nine, Three Soldiers by John Dos Passos, Remarque’s All’s Quiet on the Western Front. Some time later, I caught up with The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, still available in paperback and worth the read. But my favorite literary war? I decided immediately that Tolstoy must be excluded. Nobody was going to beat War and Peace. And I also told myself to give up the nonsense and stop playing the literary boob. I spoke aloud the old Hemingway line, “War is a catastrophe which is best avoided.” But too late, for I had already begun to think about Spain. During the thirties, immigrant families from Europe paid acute attention to any European disturbance. My father’s eldest brother had been the first to emigrate from Europe. After he got himself settled and had a job, he saved to bring the next War, Literature & the Arts 147 brother. Then the two brought a third—my father. And so forth. By the time I was born, seven had arrived here including three aunts, but the youngest brother and his family had yet to make it to America. For many families then, the rise of the Fascist powers in Germany and Italy was ominously more than a European disturbance. Letters stopped arriving, and people simply disappeared, never again to be found. At age eighty, I am the more disturbed by that loss than I was at age fifteen. Or perhaps vainly, I am revising my own small place in history. And so out of an old man’s need to do so, I remind the readers of this journal—the very people who do not require reminders from me—what happened. Or more accurately put—what should never have happened. The Spanish Civil War was a proving ground for the military of Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy.1 With the eager encouragement of General Francisco Franco, Fascist Europe had the real thing for its training maneuvers: Spain. The Luftwaffe and Italian air force flew “practice missions” that killed human beings and destroyed real buildings. The Russians also sent some aircraft to support the Loyalist cause, but for the most part whether we leaned left, right or stood straight, families like mine were grateful for the Russian intervention. Of course, as George Orwell had yet to show us, Soviet intentions in Spain probably had more to do with conflicts inside the international communist movement than in stopping the Axis powers. Unfortunately, the Fascists had no mixed motives. In addition to aircraft, the Italians also sent ground troops, and for Mussolini the war in Spain meant nothing less than the reestablishment of a twentieth-century Roman empire where Benito himself would reign as emperor. Only after his defeat in WWII could his ambitions be judged as absurdly grandiose. Franco had hoped more for a return to feudal Spain with dukes and duchesses and beautiful women descending palace staircases. For many people in England but some here in the United States as well, there was no choice possible between the Loyalists and Franco. To support the Republican or Loyalist government was to side with Stalin. To support the rebels was to side with Hitler and Mussolini. For many people, neither side could be supported, and some people lumped Stalin in with Hitler and Mussolini to make a trio of despicable dictators. For many Spanish Catholics, to support the Loyalists was to sin against the church. Whether eagerly or reluctantly, many good Catholics backed Franco; even more, especially the middle class and wealthy, sat as silently as possible waiting for it to end. Depending on which side held the town, they changed everyday wearing apparel from work clothes to their more stylish modes of dress. England and the United States, far from being ready to take on Hitler, asserted their neutrality though some members of England’s intellectual elite 148 War, Literature & the Arts openly supported Franco, Evelyn Waugh among them. Hillaire Belloc stated openly that the war “is a trial of strength between Jewish Communism and our traditional Christian civilization.” I mention this here to remind Europe and England, currently so critical (and from my perspective rightly so) of the Bush administration as being a Christian Corporation, that they have a short memory of their own twentieth-century example. Of course, of the Franco supporters, Ezra Pound was the worst. For Pound, “Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.”2 Others more properly brought up, those upper-class English who were anti-Semitic, confined their anti-Semitism to snide writing or comments made at a safe London club where they agreed that Loyalist Spain had the support of Jewish Communists in Europe and the United States as well as England. That accusation is true enough and would be the more damning if such Jewish Communists had been alone in their opposition to Franco. My father, a registered Republican in our small Ohio town and a member of both the American Legion and the VFW, reported that his World War I comrades supported the Loyalist cause. I think that was particularly true of the VFW or maybe my father simply went there more often not for political reasons but for better poker games. Put more squarely, irrespective of their religious affiliation, people—especially the veterans of World War I— recognized that Hitler’s Germany was a more immediate and frightening danger than Stalin’s Soviet Union. If one were counting pro-Loyalist supporters or merely those who despised Franco, Hillaire Belloc’s band of dangerous Jewish Communists would be a group too small for concern. True, the Comintern (Communist International) did form the Abraham Lincoln Brigade which was part of seven international battalions put together by the Soviets. All of Europe then contributed volunteers to serve the Loyalist cause. And yes, most of the Americans serving in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were communists. If their top leadership was politically savvy, most of the volunteers were kids, many of them college students, idealistic in their goals to thwart Franco but also politically ingenuous, ineptly trained and utterly inexperienced in warfare. A second American Brigade, the George Washington Brigade, was formed, but the casualties were so high for both that the two were merged. As time passed and the American casualties grew ever higher, volunteers from other countries joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade including numbers from Ireland, the sort of good Irishmen ever willing to make the right fight for the right reasons and much preferring to serve with the Americans than the English. Of the 2800 Americans who volunteered for Spain, 900 died in action. By 1938, the number of Spaniards in the Abraham Lincoln outnumbered Americans three to one.3 War, Literature & the Arts 149 Many letters of the American volunteers have now been published.4 A letter by a Canute Frankson is idealistic but tough-minded. Writing to “My Dear Friend,” Frankson joins his cause as an American Black to the struggle against tyranny in Spain. … Since this is a war between whites who for centuries have held us in slavery, and have heaped every kind of insult upon us, segregated and jim-crowed us; why I, a Negro, who have fought through these years for the rights of my people, am here in Spain today? . Because, my dear, we have joined with, and become an active part of, a great progressive force, on whose shoulders rests the responsibility of saving human civilization from the planned destruction of a small group of degenerates gone mad in their lust for power. Because if we crush Fascism here we’ll save our people in America, and in other parts of the world from the vicious persecution, wholesale imprisonment, and slaughter which the Jewish people suffered and are suffering under Hitler’s Fascist heels. Fighting in Spain, Canute Frankson understood that he was also trying to save my aunt and uncle and three cousins in Europe. I wish I knew more about him and very much hope that he survived the war.5 A Toby Jensky, an American nurse, reminds us of what we still need to be told: the consequences of war on little kids. A little girl was brought in here yesterday—all shot full of holes—both her eyes blown out.
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